EWHPTIV to Hacker Joe
by radishface
Summary: Ed can see everything, in a way you might not imagine. Postseries, with a smattering of JF and implicated SF.


**EWHPTIV to Hacker Joe**

_Disclaimers:_ Cowboy Bebop does not belong to me.

_Warnings: _Rated R for language, sexual situations.

_Summary: _Relationships are transient, related like numbers. A good user has a backup file for everything.

_Radishface_

-

There is Joe, lying in his bed on a ship orbiting Neptune, knocked out from all the drugs he's been doing. Two days ago it was Hacker Joe's fourteenth birthday and he got a new computer. He was surfing online and came across some encrypted data. He cracked the password, which was the name of some country on Earth.

So now Hacker Joe sees numbers that are binary and far from binary, like this:

1.

Space and psyche are wonderful things. Data, little particles of light and neurosis, zip through the polluted vacuum of space and traverses through satellites, scrap metal, bones and blood, mixes and memories, whatever in its trajectory.

EWHPTIV is riding an orange wavelength all around the Solar System, hills and valleys of its amplitude inducing virtual vomit as it hurtles toward its final destination.

2.

Francois is as abstract as a person will ever be:

Consciously, she is everywhere and nowhere at all.

Figuratively, she is six feet under.

Actually, she is fifteen miles below sea level in ex-Bulgaria, particles of her floating around in the ocean, drifting in and out of the respiratory systems of squids and whales and plankton with great ease.

3.

The inside of a squid is black and blue, dark and squishy. Of course this is an obvious sort of thing to anybody who has ever seen a squid, to anybody who has ever imagined what it is like to be inside a squid.

4.

Applederry and MacIntyre approach ex-Bulgaria with great speed in their jeep. They hop out and do the usual thing on the shore. They won't get to the bottom of the crater this time, there's so much ocean they would have to swim through. Applederry is fucking pissed, and MacIntyre is tearing out his purple-grey hair trying to follow the big guy around. All the hair on Applederry's head has gone white, but he still springs around like a toddler who's just found his legs, a gazelle that's just learned to stride. MacIntyre's previously purple hair is streaked with grey, and he rarely smiles, he's so worried. MacIntyre had, twenty years ago, entertained thoughts of leaving Applederry or confessing his love. He never did either, and now he is still jet-setting (or rather, jeep-setting) around the Earth making sure that Applederry takes his calcium and ginko biloba supplements every day.

One of these days MacIntyre is going to kill Applederry, or watch him die. Either one would be preferable. Applederry is like a hyperactive zombie most of the time, so unnaturally alive when he should be in a retirement home somewhere with tubes down his throat. MacIntyre thinks that he would either care terribly or not care at all, when that day comes.

Sometimes MacIntyre wonders about the person whom Applederry called "Francois," and about the person who called Applederry some paternal derivative. He thinks about her in the most abstract sense, and only remembers a vague flash of orange.

5.

There was a club on Mars called _La Petite Bourgeoise. _Riding the universal amplitudes of self-pity and denial, Faye somehow ended up here with one hand on the counter and the other holding a white Russian. There was a man playing a trumpet, mute stuck into the horn and muffling the sound, easy like tab A to slot B. She sneezed, and nobody said anything this time. Nobody came after her this time.

After we finally did it and everything. Faye smiled, but it was bitter. Men are such animals.

Somebody bumped into her. She felt an inexperienced hand reach and retreat from her pockets. What a pathetic ruse. She almost let the poor Joe get away with it, almost let him go. She watched as some kid with matted orange hair hidden under a baseball cap walk out the door. Faye waited five seconds before following him out, slapping a fifty note on the counter for her drink.

6.

The inside of the Bebop's living room was dark and blue, the only light coming from the refrigerator bulb. The door of the refrigerator was open, and Faye was peeking around inside. There was a box of shumai inside from her favorite Chinese restaurant chain. She picked it up and gave it a good shake; the shumai rattled like rocks instead of squishing against one another. The pipe to the freezer's cooling systems was broken—a screw was loose, the temperature settings gone arctic. Everything was frozen solid. She looked studiously at the box. "Damn thing is over seven days old," she smiled, and threw it back in.

7.

Seven days and twenty years ago, Jet bought a box of shumai, the cheapest kind, from the cheapest Chinese joint around. He'd only bought it so the damn Chinatown peddler would get off his case. He figured somebody might enjoy it, the kind of expected surprise one would discover seven days later, once she opened the refrigerator.

8.

Faye opens a new deck of cards with her new friends, brother-sister twins. The sister is a thirteen-year old hooker who looks about Faye's age. Her name is Marjorie. The brother is a hacker and gang member who has been passed out for the last two days in a drug-induced coma. She met them at a bar when the boy tried to steal the last couple of woolongs she had left. Whatever, let sleeping dogs lie—she's not mad about it. The boy is having epileptic fits on his bed and Faye's too tired to care and his sister is too familiar with the routine to worry.

They're hardly a rehash of the old days, hardly reincarnations of Spike and Jet.

But now Faye's going to play a game of poker with Marjorie, maybe freeload off of them for a couple days, a couple years, taking rent and candy from the babies. She's orbiting Uranus right now in their ship. The blue planet looms like a giant eyeball out the deck window. Something sparkles in the distance, ice and fire, a trail of jet smoke behind, and Faye is momentarily distracted. Marjorie covers a yawn with a delicate hand, and Faye is jolted back into reality. "Let's get started already."

9.

In orbit around Neptune, a religious cult known as The Reverend's is building a new series of gates, gates that supposedly warp space and time and send its travelers straight to heaven for a pithy sum.

Heaven's pearly gates had never looked so much like amalgamated titanium; the journey to God never felt so much like asphyxiation.

10.

Once upon a time, Jet was fixing the piping. He was trying to screw the screw into the pipe. It should have been damned simple, like tab A into slot B, like following easy assembly instructions. He kept pushing, twisting it. His fingers were getting cold and numb and unresponsive. They were too big, too coarse. They wouldn't fit.

11.

In what you or I call cyberspace, in what some others call their livelihood, in what some others call heaven realized, there is a file labeled EWHPTIV. The password is "Bulgaria." Where there once was Bulgaria, there is a crater now. Bulgaria and all of her countrymen, legitimate or not, are dead, figuratively six feet under, and literally fifteen miles below sea level, their harbinger a fiery comet that could have been a symbol of God's wrath, or some other appropriate religious analogy.

Bulgaria was EWHPTIV's last destination, funny that she should have selected a password so obvious. Yes, EWHPTIV was a person, too.

12.

His face is black and blue and feels wonderfully tender, like the inside of a squid. This is what you get for fucking around with the religious crazies. God, he should have learned by now, he should have given it up. He should have given it up when Faye left. But damn it, he's the Black Dog and he's not going to give up now. He can't give up now.

"Don't interfere in God's plan," the white-clad bodyguard knees him in the balls. "You know you'll go to Hell." Self-righteous bastard points at the sun, a distant speck of light out here in the outer gas planets. "You're lucky The Reverend is giving you a second chance."

Apparently a second chance means being locked up in a coffin that mysteriously resembles a torpedo, awaiting one's imminent launch into the far reaches of the Kuiper Belt. Jet's grade school astronomy has grown a little fuzzy as he makes his way through his fifties, but he imagines that he won't even be able to see the rumored billions of comets in the Oort Cloud before his oxygen runs out. He wants to laugh at the cosmic irony (no pun intended) but decides against it. Fate was never kind.

The white-clad bodyguard says his last rites and sprinkles some holy water over the torpedo as the onlookers look on. "May his soul rest with the Lord's billions, may he reach Your destination safely within the Hills. May the sinner be received like the rest of your cosmic children. May the sinner find his comet brethren a comfort to his lonesome soul, and salvation within the Lord's arms. In the Lord's name we pray, amen."

Jet thinks to her, see you there, someday, somehow.

The torpedo is launched in an explosion of white fire, leaving a sparkling trail of ice and smoke in its wake.

13.

Faye ends up in Jet's arms a year and a month after Spike dies. That night she comes home drunk and collapses on the couch, never mind that Jet is still sitting there. She wasn't looking. When he brings his arms around her, strong and solid and sure, she doesn't say anything. The couch is small and so Jet helps her up and they head to his room. He always had the biggest bed, he was the biggest guy out of the four, and he's still the biggest guy now that there are only two. She feels tiny in his grip, small around his fingers, which are touching her. She closes her eyes and tries to ignore the alcohol on her own breath, the stickiness in her mouth. Her head is swimming. She's all wet all over, inside and out. When she opens her eyes again, she tries to imagine anybody else in this position: Spike, Vicious, Gren, Whitney. Their fingers all squirm simultaneously in her, she opens up to all of them. She feels dirty, so she fucks herself harder on Jet's fingers and then turns over and tells him to do it. Unzipping, unfolding, undoing, god, how long does it take to fucking stick his prick inside her, it's not rocket science, it's easy assembly, it's tab A in slot B. He finally gets it in, yes, and it feels so good. He's big and she's full of him and in this position she can pretend he's anybody, except she doesn't want to pretend it's anybody except him.

She comes, and then he does, and the pleasure zings up and down her body like electricity, exploding at her fingertips and her toes, making her cry.

He holds her afterwards, even when she says, oh god Jet, let me go.

He could have held her, still. He could have held her down easily and pinned her there and she might have liked that, except her mouth is filled with cotton balls and her pride is runny and liquid, her body a sieve. She thinks as she runs, a woman has already left Jet once before. It shouldn't be too bad that another one is doing the same.

14.

EWHPTIV wakes up inside Hacker Joe, realizes she now has a penis and balls and froth and spit all over her face. His face. He's stewing in his own juice, a mixture of piss and blood and come, and feels like cold shit. Two days ago it was his fourteenth birthday and before he had passed out he had been downloading EWHPTIV. Whatever.

Joe wipes himself up, gathers his sheets and throws them in the laundry hamper. The takes a shower. He's toweling his hair off when he walks out of the room with a bounce in his step, fresh and clean. A flash of orange passes his thoughts in the most abstract sense, and he remembers, vaguely.

Outside in the living room, Joe sees two people playing cards. "Hey, Marjorie," he says. "Hey, Faye-Faye."

---

_end_


End file.
